Week 7: Population ethics

Key readings

• Hilary Greaves, Population axiology, Philosophy Compass, forthcoming.
• Jeff McMahan, Causing people to exist and saving people's lives, The Journal of Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1 (June, 2013), pp. 5-35.

Further reading

• Gustaf Arrhenius, The impossibility of a satisfactory population ethics, in H. Colonius and E. Dzhafarov (eds.), Descriptive and Normative Approaches to Human Behavior, Hackensack, New Jersey: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2011, pp. 1-26.
• Gustaf Arrhenius, Jesper Ryberg & Torbjörn Tännsjö, The Repugnant Conclusion, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2014.
• Charles Blackorby, Walter Bossert & David Donaldson, The Axiomatic approach to population ethics, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, vol. 2, no. 3 (October, 2003), pp. 342-381.
• John Broome, Should we value population?, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 4 (December, 2005), pp. 399-413.
• Derek Parfit, Overpopulation and the quality of life, in Peter Singer (ed.) Applied Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 145–164.
• Alex Voorhoeve & Marc Fleurbaey, Priority or equality for possible people?, Ethics, forthcoming.